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A Relational Turn for Data Protection?
Get PDFIf there’s one thing everyone in the data protection debate can agree on, it’s that it’s all about the data. All over the world, data protection regimes fixate on when data can be collected, how it is being processed, when it can be accessed or should be deleted, and whether it is personal, sensitive, or deidentified. This is true even for approaches that seem quite different at first glance, such as the U.S. and EU
Firm-Level Automation: Evidence from the Netherlands
No full textStudying firm-level adjustments is important for understanding the economic effects of workplace automation. So far, emerging firm-level evidence is focused on robotics and the manufacturing sector. In this paper, we document that the adoption of automation technologies extends beyond manufacturing firms. We identify firm-level automation events and show that automating firms experience faster employment and revenue growth than do nonautomating firms. However, around automation events themselves, employment growth slows markedly. Notably, we find that these effects are similar for manufacturing and nonmanufacturing firms, suggesting that an increasing diffusion of automation technology has important consequences for firms and their workers
Rationing Crisis: Bogus Standards of Care Unmasked by COVID-19
Get PDFAfter the spectacular failure to apply acceptable triage methods to evacuate patients from a flooded Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina, preparedness planning was intensified (Fink Citation2013). Regarding physicians and hospitals, two approaches got the most attention: (1) diluting the legal “standard of care” for physicians and hospitals so they would be immune from lawsuit for negligent acts during a crisis (“crisis standards of care”); and (2) developing triage protocols for scarce resource allocation. Both can be considered crude works in process. Nonetheless, in the midst of the greatest national crisis since 9/11, I think it is time to declare the crisis standards of care approach dead, and the triage approach in need of significant therapy to survive.
The idea that unites these two approaches seems seductively straightforward: in a crisis there is a danger that medical resources, such as ventilators, may be in such short supply that at least some physicians may not be able to obtain them for all of their patients who need them. In these circumstances, it is suggested that the duty of physicians shifts from “standard of care” medicine focused on individual patients to “crisis standards of care” under which the physician’s loyalty is transferred from individual patients to “acting to prioritize the community.” (Berlinger et al. Citation2020; Institute of Medicine Citation2009)
Genome Editing 2020: Ethics and Human Rights in Germline Editing in Humans and Gene Drives in Mosquitoes
Get PDFThe moon landing, now more than a half century in the past, has turned out to be the culmination of human space travel, rather than its beginning. Genetic engineering, especially applications of CRISPR, now presents the most publicly discussed engineering challenges—and not just technical, but ethical as well. In this article, I will use the two most controversial genomic engineering applications to help identify the ethics and human rights implications of these research projects. Each of these techniques directly modifies the mechanisms of evolution, threatens to alter our views of ourselves as humans and our planet as our home, and presents novel informed consent and dual use challenges: human genome editing and gene drives in insects.
I begin with a discussion of so far disastrously unsuccessful attempts to regulate germline editing in humans, including a summary of the first application of germline genome editing in humans and its aftermath. I then turn to a discussion of setting ethical standards for a genomic technology that has not yet been deployed in nature—gene drives. Finally, I end by suggesting that human rights can and should be directly applicable to defining the ethics of genomic research
Equality is a Brokered Idea
Get PDFThis essay examines the Supreme Court\u27s stunning decision in the census case, Department of Commerce v. New York. I characterize Chief Justice John Roberts\u27 decision to side with the liberals as an example of pursuing the ends of equality by other means – this time, through the rule of reason. Although the appeal was limited in scope, the stakes for political and racial equality were sky high. In blocking the administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, 5 members of the Court found the justification the administration gave to be a pretext. In this instance, that lie had a major consequence: Republican officials could not follow through on their apparent scheme to engage in partisan entrenchment by depressing census responses from Hispanic citizens and undocumented migrants. I defend this creative effort to manipulate the political value of time and characterize the Court\u27s invocation of the rule of reason as an effective substitute for the principle of equality under the circumstances. Drawing on my new book, PRACTICAL EQUALITY (Norton 2019), I also put the strategy in jurisprudential context among past instances where reason ended up being the grounds for a consensus when an equality issue seemed intractable
Feminist Activism in the Context of Clinical Trials and Drug Roll-Out
No full textIn 2006, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Gardasil, a Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine, for the purposes of stopping the spread of HPV, a primary cause of cervical cancer. While its development and approval were largely seen as necessary steps forward for women’s health, feminist movements in both the United States and India took a critical posture toward the vaccine. Their reactions derived from a shared skepticism of how knowledge is produced and diffused by federal agencies and pharmaceutical companies about women’s bodies. Using the HPV vaccine as an example, this chapter examines the role of feminists in bioethical debates about the production of knowledge about women’s bodies and the politics of vaccine roll-out
Why millennials will win Trump\u27s war on socially responsible investing
No full textThe United States Department of Labor (DOL) spent the summer declaring war on socially responsible investing. Under current Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, DOL took two huge steps to crush so-called “ESG” — environmental, social, and governance investing. The first, smaller, mostly procedural step took place in June with a move that would sharply increase the paperwork and regulatory burdens on ESG investors. The second, more brazen step took place just before Labor Day, when DOL proposed a rule change designed to get pension investors to stop voting in annual corporate elections. Though these attempts pose a significant threat to ESG, particularly if the Trump administration wins a second term and has a chance to enforce them for the next four years, we think this effort will ultimately fail. The reason is that the law is often weak in the face of powerful social and economic forces. And the overwhelming force driving ESG is the economic rise of the millennials
Racial Purges
Get PDFIn a two-year period, 1885-86, over 168 communities in America forcibly expelled Chinese residents from their midst. This essay, inspired by historian Beth Lew-Williams\u27s book, THE CHINESE MUST GO, investigates the nineteenth-century purges of Chinese residents that occurred throughout the American west. I make three arguments. First, these acts of racial and political terror complicate our understanding of racial violence in America. Many of the actions were denounced, but they were also surprisingly effective in forcing business and political leaders to support the indefinite suspension of Chinese migration. Perpetrators faced almost no legal repercussions, and unlike for freed persons, racial violence didn\u27t lead to significant legislation to help the Chinese. Judicial rulings were mixed: the recognition of birthright citizenship was a high point, but rulings that codified exclusion as a national policy and recycled theories of cultural incompatibility proved problematic. Second, this wave of domestic terror complicates our view of popular constitutionalism. A wide range of anti-Chinese mobilization — from aggressive boycotts to lynchings and beatings to purges accomplished without a single shot fired — were justified by perpetrators according to America\u27s higher law tradition. It should trouble us that these methods were so successful. Third, moving in a normative direction, I urge a new way of talking about inequality where we don\u27t merely stress reasons to oppose inequality but instead create a typology of different forms of inequality. This will allow us to better appreciate the clusters of harms that certain historical forms of inequality create, along with the clusters of reasons to oppose a particular type of inequality. For instance, the racial purges undertaken against the Chinese shared characteristics with other forms of inequality, especially lynching, detention, and the use of symbols or signage to convey a message of status inequality
The Affordable Care Act: Up for a Final Vote?
Get PDFFor more than a decade, the minimum essential coverage requirement, commonly known as the individual mandate, has been a key point of controversy over the ACA, symbolizing ideological and political disagreements over government assistance to low-income populations, federal regulation of private industry, and the legacy of President Obama. 26 U.S.C. §5000A(a) requires everyone (with exceptions) to be covered by a private or public health benefit program meeting ACA standards. 26 U.S.C. §5000A(b) requires those who are not so covered to pay a fee (“shared responsibility payment”) to the Treasury. 26 U.S.C. §5000A(c) sets forth the amount of that fee
Guns in the Private Square
Get PDFThe regulation of guns has been one of the most hotly debated public policy issues in the United States throughout the country’s history. But, up until recently, it has always been just that — a debate about public policy. Two recent developments have changed the landscape and moved the debate about publicly carrying firearms from the realm of public policy, to the realm of private decision-making and private law. First, laws related to publicly carrying firearms have been dramatically loosened throughout the United States to the point that, in the vast majority of states, anyone who is legally allowed to carry a firearm is also eligible to legally carry a gun in public. Second, truly public spaces — spaces owned by state and local governments and open to all — have shrunk considerably and been replaced by spaces that are owned by private businesses but open to the public such as big box stores, shopping malls, building plazas, and even sidewalks. The upshot of these two trends is that the decisions businesses make about whether to allow guns on their property will have a large impact on the degree to which the general public is exposed to guns when going about their daily lives.This Article argues that businesses can be held accountable for the consequences of these decisions through tort liability. Specifically, most businesses should be subject to premises liability if they do not have an explicit and clearly communicated policy prohibiting customers from bringing guns into their stores when the failure to have such a policy causes a customer’s injury. The Article explains that assigning such liability will not interfere with the goals of permissive concealed carry laws or the rights protected by the Second Amendment. Indeed, such liability would not even force businesses to ban guns, instead it would only force businesses to internalize the costs of those decisions. The Article concludes by situating the controversy over guns in private businesses within a larger trend of the privatization of the gun debate